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I once worked with an F500 retailer who had Bentonville 'graduates' among their IT staff. Sharp people among other sharp people. It takes a lot to keep the ligh

I once worked with an F500 retailer who had Bentonville 'graduates' among their IT staff. Sharp people among other sharp people. It takes a lot to keep the lights on pretty much everywhere. Walk in to any big box store and look around for how many gadgets and systems there are.

Diederich 7y ago
Most everyone would be amazed at much networked equipment is in a WalMart supercenter. By the time I left, there were four routers, four big core switches, a couple dozen 'edge' switches, and scores of access points. And that's just the networking gear. As of 2009, my team's network discovery system had identified tens of millions of separate IP addressable nodes on the global network. At that scale, everything had to be almost perfectly automated. And, to be clear, this was not a static, boring network. Stores, home offices, distribution centers, you name it, were being added, moved, expanded, deallocated 24 hours a day, all over the world. And the device configs were far from cookie cutter. An eye-wateringly complex heuristic was required to dynamically create router, switch and access point config that would allow a given store to function. And, one quarter in the early 2000s, we (Network Engineering) achieved six sigma (99.9999%) global uptime. Things did start going downhill around 2004 or so, a few years after Kevin Turner became CIO.
- samstave 7y ago
  Yeah walmart is a really beautifully ugly beast of a company. On all levels, not hust tech... Ill have to look into kevin turner though, i dont know who that is.... Anything you’d care to share/point at?
  - Diederich 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Kevin_Turner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Kevin_Turner is the guy but it doesn't give any mention as to why I (and many of my peers) believe that his tenure as Walmart CIO had a strong negative influence on ISDs trajectory. I don't have much time right now, but I'll share a moment when I saw him interacting with some people during a crisis. We got hit really hard with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) even though only a minority of our systems were running Windows at the time. There were, at the time, a pair of Windows servers in each store, and each store was connected via a 56k frame relay circuit to the home office, along with a modem connected to a standard phone line for dial backup in case that was down. Anyway, Code Red rapidly spread through all of these servers, and together they created enough traffic to basically bring down the frame relay network. We were, at the time, slightly over-subscribed at the T1 termination points, so if most of the stores on a termination leg maxed out their individual 56k links at the same time, the whole leg would be effectively down. (Apologies for the unexpected dive into old networking stuff...it kind of just came out. :) So most of our stores were down hard, meaning that most card transactions would not work. There was a facility to allow credit cards to go through without verification with a relatively low charge ceiling. But especially back then most transactions were NOT credit, and so weren't working. This was a bad, bad situation, and it persisted for a number of days. It might have garnered some national news attention. There were a number of war rooms going on. My team was in one, and we were working towards a solution by using a transient dial backup connection to reach into the store router and apply a draconian ACL. ANYway, back to Kevin Turner. We saw him talking to a group of VPs and directors outside of our war room. He dismissed most of them, except for one, with whom he continued to have a very heated conversation. Turner was definitely the aggressor; he got closer and closer to this person, got louder and louder. He ended up backing him against a wall and shouting in his face for a few minutes before walking away, jabbing his finger in his chest. Just one story. We didn't like KT very much.
    - samstave 7y ago
      Heh, I had the same network back in that time too! 3640s all the way down! I had to recover the password on one when i inherited that network. I will never forget that password: Feet4Monkey. Ill also never forget my ix.netcom.com password that was initially assigned to me....
      - Diederich 7y ago
        > ix.netcom.com Nice, that was a blast from the past. I used netcom.com for a few years in the early 1990s. Good times.
Diederich 7y ago
> I once worked with an F500 retailer who had Bentonville 'graduates' among their IT staff. May I ask which one? Just idle curiosity.
- pjmorris 7y ago
  Home Depot. Even ~15 years ago, they had an amazing amount of technology to support a single store, let alone the supply chain. I once worked in Point of Sale (POS) at Darden and several POS vendors and consulting companies. Even 25 years ago, your average fast food or mid-range (e.g. Red Lobster) restaurant had a network of ~10 or more computers running various POS, inventory, ordering, scheduling, and other processes.

Diederich 7y ago

Most everyone would be amazed at much networked equipment is in a WalMart supercenter. By the time I left, there were four routers, four big core switches, a couple dozen 'edge' switches, and scores of access points. And that's just the networking gear. As of 2009, my team's network discovery system had identified tens of millions of separate IP addressable nodes on the global network. At that scale, everything had to be almost perfectly automated. And, to be clear, this was not a static, boring network. Stores, home offices, distribution centers, you name it, were being added, moved, expanded, deallocated 24 hours a day, all over the world. And the device configs were far from cookie cutter. An eye-wateringly complex heuristic was required to dynamically create router, switch and access point config that would allow a given store to function. And, one quarter in the early 2000s, we (Network Engineering) achieved six sigma (99.9999%) global uptime. Things did start going downhill around 2004 or so, a few years after Kevin Turner became CIO.

samstave 7y ago
Yeah walmart is a really beautifully ugly beast of a company. On all levels, not hust tech... Ill have to look into kevin turner though, i dont know who that is.... Anything you’d care to share/point at?
- Diederich 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Kevin_Turner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Kevin_Turner is the guy but it doesn't give any mention as to why I (and many of my peers) believe that his tenure as Walmart CIO had a strong negative influence on ISDs trajectory. I don't have much time right now, but I'll share a moment when I saw him interacting with some people during a crisis. We got hit really hard with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) even though only a minority of our systems were running Windows at the time. There were, at the time, a pair of Windows servers in each store, and each store was connected via a 56k frame relay circuit to the home office, along with a modem connected to a standard phone line for dial backup in case that was down. Anyway, Code Red rapidly spread through all of these servers, and together they created enough traffic to basically bring down the frame relay network. We were, at the time, slightly over-subscribed at the T1 termination points, so if most of the stores on a termination leg maxed out their individual 56k links at the same time, the whole leg would be effectively down. (Apologies for the unexpected dive into old networking stuff...it kind of just came out. :) So most of our stores were down hard, meaning that most card transactions would not work. There was a facility to allow credit cards to go through without verification with a relatively low charge ceiling. But especially back then most transactions were NOT credit, and so weren't working. This was a bad, bad situation, and it persisted for a number of days. It might have garnered some national news attention. There were a number of war rooms going on. My team was in one, and we were working towards a solution by using a transient dial backup connection to reach into the store router and apply a draconian ACL. ANYway, back to Kevin Turner. We saw him talking to a group of VPs and directors outside of our war room. He dismissed most of them, except for one, with whom he continued to have a very heated conversation. Turner was definitely the aggressor; he got closer and closer to this person, got louder and louder. He ended up backing him against a wall and shouting in his face for a few minutes before walking away, jabbing his finger in his chest. Just one story. We didn't like KT very much.
  - samstave 7y ago
    Heh, I had the same network back in that time too! 3640s all the way down! I had to recover the password on one when i inherited that network. I will never forget that password: Feet4Monkey. Ill also never forget my ix.netcom.com password that was initially assigned to me....
    - Diederich 7y ago
      > ix.netcom.com Nice, that was a blast from the past. I used netcom.com for a few years in the early 1990s. Good times.

Diederich 7y ago

> I once worked with an F500 retailer who had Bentonville 'graduates' among their IT staff. May I ask which one? Just idle curiosity.

pjmorris 7y ago
Home Depot. Even ~15 years ago, they had an amazing amount of technology to support a single store, let alone the supply chain. I once worked in Point of Sale (POS) at Darden and several POS vendors and consulting companies. Even 25 years ago, your average fast food or mid-range (e.g. Red Lobster) restaurant had a network of ~10 or more computers running various POS, inventory, ordering, scheduling, and other processes.